by David Hughes
De Souza was equally nonplussed by the script’s description of the monster itself, which he describes as “a guy-in-a-suit kind of creature. It lived off adrenaline,” he adds, “sucking adrenaline out of your body with these big nails, like a vampire. It reminded me way too much of a picture called It! The Terror from Beyond Space, which was itself a rip-off of ‘Black Destroyer’ and ‘Discord in Scarlet’, from A.E. van Vogt’s short story collection The Voyage of the Space Beagle. So with ISOBAR, you had a rip-off of a rip-off.” Overall, he says, “It was too much like Alien, the monster wasn’t fresh enough and there was no explanation of why the world was this way — it was one of these science fiction movies where it’s supposed to be the near-future, but it’s a completely implausible near-future without any kind of explanation. The script was just embarrassing.
“I told the producers, ‘The biggest problem you have here is Sly doesn’t want to be ‘sci-fi Rambo’, and even if he’s not sci-fi Rambo, you want to make him a scientist, which makes him culpable because he brought the thing onto a civilian train, and as soon as he let his superiors convince him that it’s a good idea to bring a dangerous creature onto a civilian train, he’s poisoned as a hero.’” De Souza felt that audiences wouldn’t respect a character who makes the wrong moral choices, unless the consequences are dealt with in the course of the film. “So I said, ‘If Sly’s trying to do something different, and if everybody keeps saying he wants to do something like Die Hard, let him be just an ordinary guy on the train,’” de Souza continues. “I mean, in Die Hard, Bruce Willis was a cop, but he was so over matched, he was like an ordinary guy. They didn’t make him a Green Beret or Special Forces; he was just a cop and he had nine cartridges in his pistol, and that was it. So I said, ‘Let’s do something like that with Sly.’ And they said, ‘Well, what about a security guard?’ and I said, ‘No, let’s just have him be a guy on the train.’ I kept coming up against walls, because they said, ‘That’s not special enough.’”
De Souza suggested a compromise, to make the train’s passengers (and, by extension, the audience) assume Stallone’s character was a hero type: “Let’s make them think he’s something special, so people on the train go to him and say, ‘Oh, you must be the hero because of your strange behaviour.’ But he says, ‘Well, actually, I’m...’ — not that this would be it — ‘researching a role for a movie,’ or something, so that the audience is misled, and it turns out Sly is just an ordinary guy.” It was Mario Kassar who finally proposed the solution, recalling a British Airways Concorde flight in which the passenger sitting next to him had made the cabin crew’s journey as difficult as possible. “Mario said that this guy kept ringing the stewardess for all kinds of stuff, like he doesn’t like his pillow... And then at the end of the flight, he called over the stewardess and said, ‘I work for British Airways. That’s why I was being difficult, and you were really great.’ I said, ‘That’s great, Mario, let’s make Sly that guy.’ So once the Sly character identifies himself to the stewardess or the purser, and tells her why he’s been such a pain in the ass, they sort of have to be in charge because they’re at least minor company officials.”
The next challenge was to explain why, in the far future, trains might be the preferred form of transport. De Souza’s solution was to suggest that ozone layer damage or global warming meant that jet-powered air travel was no longer viable. Continuing that theme, “people were wearing masks, cities were burrowing deeper, there were air alerts and large portions of the country had deadly pollution.” Now that de Souza had made the trains ubiquitous, he decided that the one on which the monster gets loose should be a special one. “Let’s make it the inaugural transatlantic train,” he suggested. “Let’s say they’ve built a bridge between Greenland and Iceland, and it’s actually the first train from New York to London; the first trans-continental trip of a magnetic levitation train, so there’s all kinds of hoopla.” Suddenly, ISOBAR began to look less like a traditional Sylvester Stallone vehicle and more like an ensemble piece. “Now it becomes like Murder on the Orient Express or Grand Hotel, with all these wonderful characters,” de Souza points out.
One by one, cast members began to board the project. Future Academy Award-winner Kim Basinger, who had recently appeared as Vicki Vale in Batman, was Stallone’s leading lady. Character actor Michael Jeter (a supporting player in Stallone’s Tango & Cash) signed on as a con artist who had tricked his way onto the train. A part was written specially for Italian screen legend Sophia Loren. James Belushi (Red Heat, K-9) was cast as a boorish entrepreneur who had made his fortune selling eggs and sperm over the equivalent of the Internet. “I could see this coming,” says de Souza, of the inspiration behind Belushi’s character. “He had a thing called ‘Babies R Us’ and he did his own commercial like a car salesman. You saw his ad in the movie, and it was like, ‘Are your sperm slow swimmers? Have your eggs been out of the fridge too long? Call us now — only US, grade A choice farm girls provide our eggs.’ It was comical, but it could be real.” Naturally, de Souza says, the other first class passengers looked down on this nouveau riche figure. “He was like that character in Dinner at Eight, the rich guy who’d made his money in pork rinds. There was also a rich lady travelling with her granddaughter, who’s being taken to an arranged marriage, and a poor boy who’s like a nomad kid, a stowaway. So there was a teenage romance, an older romance between Sly and Kim Basinger, and a couple of great older characters, one of whom was like a Walter Matthau character, because we wanted to get Walter Matthau.”
Perhaps the most important character of all, however, was the creature. Here, de Souza was inspired by the 1957 film 20 Million Miles to Earth, in which the Ymir, an alien creature brought back from Venus, grows to enormous size and threatens the Italian city of Rome. “It starts out very harmless, so you actually feel sorry for it. And then because people are mean to it and a dog attacks it, it ends up becoming violent, and as it gets bigger and bigger it’s a menace, and they kill it on the Colosseum. So we wanted to have some sympathy for this monster until it moults and changes a little bit.” De Souza also suggested making the creature a plant-based life form. “I said, ‘Since we’re stealing from the best, let’s do Howard Hawks’ The Thing From Another World.’ Because the whole ecology was screwed up, this company had tried to genetically engineer this hybrid plant that would clean up the air. They’d done all kinds of illegal gene-splicing, and they’d created this fast-growing hybrid plant that would manufacture oxygen at a tremendous rate. It was their industrial secret. But they were having problems with it — the previous ones had died, and they had to get this one to London because this time they’d figured out what was wrong. And the thing had this tremendous thirst for water, so once it broke out, it sucked all the water out of its victims, so they’d find somebody and they’d be like a mummy and they’d crumble to dust.”
The creature was designed by multiple Academy Award winner Rick Baker, whose credits ranged from An American Werewolf in London to Gorillas in the Mist. “I actually have a video tape of a monster test Rick Baker did,” de Souza reveals. “He also made the first victim — a very real-looking guy, who had one arm that could move. And when the creature got bigger it had tentacles that wrapped round you and sucked all the water out. It really was amazing.” Despite its influences, he says, “We made a really fresh monster. I liked the monster a lot.”
One of the things de Souza wanted to do was to subvert the audience’s expectations by having the creature kill a character they didn’t expect — a trick as old as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. “We wrote a part for a guy like Clint Eastwood,” he says, “a big star who would come into the movie and say ‘I’m the hero, I’m in charge,’ give everybody a big stirring speech — and then get killed. That happened [years later] in Deep Blue Sea,” he adds, “where Samuel L. Jackson comes in and then gets killed.” Up to this point, Stallone’s character had reluctantly assumed the role of hero: “He says, ‘Until we get to the next train station, when we can sort
this out, we have to do things.’ They’ve barricaded the back cars, and they know there’s some kind of creature on the train that’s killing people and they need help. So they go to the next stop, and this guy gets on the train — and we immediately kill him! It was pretty cool.”
The tension is further ratcheted up by the failure of the communication system, meaning that no one on board the train is able to contact the outside world. “Of course, they don’t know that the reason for the failure of the communication system is that the people who brought the thing on the train have sabotaged it, because they don’t want the story getting out — they have to do damage control now,” de Souza explains. “Their plan is to get the creature back under control, get off the train at some point on the line, and kill anybody who knows the truth.” By now, however, the train is out of control, and everyone, good and bad, is forced to work together in order to save the day: “At this point they were probably all in the same cage — they need to keep the creature from coming into this car. So the bad guys and good guys are working together, but you know at a certain point their agendas will diverge.”
“I never read de Souza’s version,” Jim Uhls admits. “I heard that it changed everything to be more of a large-cast Irwin Allen-type of disaster movie.” Nevertheless, it was de Souza’s draft which seemed likely to get a green light from the studio. Production designer Dante Ferretti, a regular collaborator with Federico Fellini and, later, Martin Scorsese, began designing sets, while Academy Award winning costume designer Marilyn Vance (48HRS, Predator, Die Hard) created what de Souza describes as “some very prescient costume designs describing a very retro future.” So advanced was the project that set construction was due to begin within a week, until Carolco collapsed under the strain of a string of flops — most notably Cutthroat Island — and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Mario Kassar and Andrew Vajna went their separate ways, with the latter going on to form Cinergi, where he would draft in de Souza to rewrite another Sylvester Stallone vehicle, Judge Dredd. “It was a shock to me when ISOBAR collapsed, because everything that I’d worked on always got made. It’s a good thing I didn’t buy that Rolls-Royce. I thought it was a great script that should have been made,” he adds, “but movies get made not because the script is great, but because somebody likes the script at that point.”
Ironically, Carolco’s bankruptcy almost gave ISOBAR a second chance, several years after the film and the company jumped the rails. At the bankruptcy hearing for the company, Kassar and Vajna showed up to bid for several of the properties their dissolved company had owned, despite the fact that Carolco’s collapse had left millions of dollars’ worth of debts unpaid. Says de Souza, “You’d think the judge would say, ‘Wait a second, didn’t you guys run the previous company?’” By now, de Souza was among the most successful screenwriters in Hollywood, with almost one billion dollars’ worth of box office receipts from films bearing either his name, or his imprint, and he attended the hearing hoping to buy back the ISOBAR script, which he felt was among his best work. “I think they showed maybe $5 or 7 million ‘negative’ cost,” he recalls, referring to the cumulative amount of money Carolco had spent on the script, set designs, Rick Baker’s creature tests and the director’s customary ‘pay or play’ deal, which would have to be paid out of any future profits. Although the bailiffs initially set a price of fifty cents on the dollar, meaning that the project could be bought for half of the costs accrued against it, it was too rich for de Souza’s blood. “There was no way I could go there,” he says.
At least one person appeared to believe that de Souza had made a successful bid for the project. Although he had been lauded for his acting performance in Cop Land, Sylvester Stallone’s career had suffered a slump in the decade following 1993’s Cliffhanger, the box office performances of films like Judge Dredd, Get Carter, Driven and D-Tox being indicative of a precipitous downturn in his popularity. What he needed was a sure-fire comeback film like Schwarzenegger’s Terminator 3. “Sometime in late 2002 or early 2003 I went to a dinner party, and Sly was there, with his manager,” de Souza recalls. “I started to think that the reason I was invited to this dinner party was because they thought I controlled the rights to the ISOBAR script. The conversation turned in a very clumsy fashion to that project, you know: ‘We should make that now. I’m ready to do that now.’” It was not to be. Although Stallone’s star would recover some of its former sheen, thanks to the critical and commercial success of Rocky Balboa and, to a lesser degree, Rambo, he no longer boasted the box office clout to get something as expensive as ISOBAR into cinemas.
In fact, the rights to the ISOBAR project wound up in the hands of two of its longest-term fans: Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin, who had by now scored big with Stargate for MGM and Independence Day for Fox, and were about to make their first film under a new deal with Sony Pictures. Aware that all interests in the ISOBAR property were about to be auctioned for what amount to cents on the dollar, with all debts forgiven, Emmerich and Devlin persuaded Sony to buy it for them. In the wake of the box office disappointment Godzilla — if $379 million worldwide can be described as disappointing — the pair had failed to launch Supertanker, a disaster movie about a gigantic ship filled with natural gas which terrorists use to hold San Diego to ransom, nor a big-budget remake of the sci-fi classic Fantastic Voyage. Both projects had been written by Tab Murphy, best known as screenwriter of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Tarzan, Atlantis: The Lost Continent and Brother Bear for Disney, and as writer-director of Last of the Dogmen. As Murphy recalls, “I met Roland and Dean when they were in Yuma, Arizona, making Stargate, which was produced by Joel Michaels, who also produced Last of the Dogmen. Joel suggested that I hang out on the set of Stargate, and we all became friends.”
It was Devlin who suggested Murphy take a pass at Supertanker to try to jump start that project, and subsequently brought him on to write the update of Fantastic Voyage. “Then they had me write a script based on an original idea of Roland’s, a science fiction story set on a savage planet where these guys come and have a hunting expedition every year to hunt the monsters. It was a big, fun tentpole movie. And that’s, ultimately, what led to ISOBAR.” Says Devlin, “Tab was the first person I hired to do a rewrite after we got the rights out of bankruptcy. He’s one of my favourite writers. We’ve worked with him three or four times now, and think he’s terrific, really talented. And you couldn’t meet a nicer guy in Hollywood.”
Murphy believes this would have been a few years after de Souza’s involvement, and certainly after 2001, when Emmerich and Devlin parted company, the latter setting up an umbrella company for future projects, Electric Entertainment. “They had kind of gone their separate ways at that point,” says Murphy, “but they had agreed that there were certain projects they would work on together. ISOBAR was one of them. It was a back-burner project for them, which they wanted to re-activate, so suddenly there was a big push.” Murphy visited Devlin at Electric Entertainment’s offices, looked at all of the pre-production artwork, read de Souza’s draft, and discussed the producer’s objectives for the first ISOBAR script of the twenty-first century. “Then I went off and wrote a draft that actually wasn’t very well received,” Murphy recalls. “I think it had to do with the lead character, whom I had written as a very hardbitten, cynical sort of anti-hero, which wasn’t what they were looking for. Then I wrote another draft which they were happy with.”
Murphy’s second draft, entitled The ISOBAR Run, begins with a view of the Earth from space. “But something is terribly wrong. The entire surface of Mother Earth is covered with a dirty brown haze, the atmosphere stagnant and poisonous, familiar land formations barely discernible. We are looking at a dead planet.” The script then cuts to ‘Old Los Angeles — 2097,’ where ‘bedos’ scratch for a living on the toxic surface, at the mercy not only of disease and starvation, but also regular murderous sweeps by bio-suited ‘science cops.’ “Healthy living through genocide,” mutters Prine, a new recruit, sardonically, bef
ore rescuing a twelve-year-old urchin, Ollie, from death by cleanup squad. Below ground, in ‘New Los Angeles,’ society is flourishing, with “streets filled with electric cars that crisscross a labyrinth of low buildings as far as the eye can see. Artificial lighting lends an eerie fluorescent glow to the atmosphere.” Prine and Ollie are about to witness the maiden voyage of the ‘ISOBAR Mark V,’3 a floating supertrain linking North America with Asia through a tunnel at up to 2,000 kilometres per hour. Prine follows Ollie onto the train, which leaves with both of them on board.
As in de Souza’s version, the inaugural ride of the Los Angeles-Hawaii-Tokyo run boasts a motley assortment of passengers, in the classic disaster movie mold; for more obscure reasons, it is also being used to transport a secret, deadly cargo: “a highly mobile plant hybrid, an aggressive organism capable of hunting down water in arid conditions, much like a predator hunts down its prey.” Naturally, the creature gets loose on the train, killing anyone it encounters and sucking them dry of the thing it feeds on: water. As the train hurtles towards Hawaii, its first stop, the creature continues to cause chaos, building a dense jungle of vines and webbing in which it ‘stores’ victims, reminiscent of the deleted cocoon sequence from Alien, which was re-engineered in Aliens. “The men watch with a mixture of astonishment and horror as the room turns into a living jungle. The creature’s webbing soon covers every last inch of surface area, creating an alien, otherworldly environment.”4 Along the way, the creature causes sufficient structural damage for the train to crash, just before it reaches Hawaii. Now, not only is the ISOBAR on its inaugural journey, with a deadly escaped plant and a stowaway on board, it’s also a runaway train! With half of the train’s thousand passengers dead and many of the rest injured, Prine discovers that the creature has the potential to replenish the Earth’s stagnant oxygen supply within ten years — assuming it isn’t killed first. Can Prine risk destroying the creature, even if it represents mankind’s only hope of returning to the surface?5
